Pete gets very quiet once he realizes that Sam is serious. He listens with a stunned look on his face as she lays out the bare bones of her daily life: the Stargate, the pyramids, humans abducted and enslaved on other planets, the Goa’uld, the Tok’ra, the Asgard. She shares the story behind Osiris and Sarah and Daniel. She tells him that her dad is a host to a Tok’ra symbiote.

Finally, she stops speaking and for a few minutes there’s silence as she waits for him to process this new reality. She thinks she’s ready to answer any questions he has. The day she had been read into the Stargate program had been exciting, unsettling, and frightening in turn. They know so much more now about what’s out there, she can only imagine that the effect must be exponentially multiplied.

Suddenly, he grins and says, “So those Asgard, they look just like in the movies, huh?”

Sam blinks. That was what he chose to focus on? Not that Earth had enemies so technologically advanced as to be nearly indistinguishable from gods, not that these enemies can take over anyone and hide in plain sight, not that humanity is fighting for its very survival. He wants to know if Hollywood got it right. “Uh, yeah,” she answers. “Pretty much.”

“Cool,” he replies, still grinning goofily. Sam hopes she can blame it on the painkillers.